Posted 13 February, 2025 in:

• design

Valentine’s Day 2025.

Unless you’re a jerk. But if you are, and you stop being a jerk, I promise I’ll think you’re cool!

Probably, you’re cool. I’d like to think you are. So what better day than Valentine’s Day to express it to random people that happen to be on the same planet?

Right now we can see a lot of the jerks. Their faces are plastered on lots of articles about the ongoing attempts to destroy an imperfect government. But we also see a lot of cool people doing what they can to stop it. The lawsuits are flying, the Democrats in Congress have had to take on a second job since the Republicans won’t do theirs. So keep your cool, because you’re cool!

One of the cooler things about diving into the great heap of blogs in search of ones to follow is how many there are and how varied they are. Most of them don’t have content I want to catch in the reader, but most of them are still cool despite that. Lots of technical blogs, people trying to help one another squeeze performance or productivity out of their tools and computers. Lots of folks who care about accessibility and making the web a diverse space for humanity to thrive in.

My current blogsearch model has evolved into a local HTML file with the main content comprising a series of unordered lists of links, which I use as a FIFO queue. That means I click the top list links, and once I hit the end of a section, I clear at list out of the file and the next one becomes the top list.

This has a number of advantages:

• Has a text editor and browser interface, with minimal coding needed (mostly some regular-expression-based search-and-replace, to get the lists in order to be used in the file).

• By using CSS counters, I added a simple progress-tracker (i.e., at the top it says “Total: {number},” where the number is given by CSS content).

• I can add more lists to the bottom of the file as I go. This happens when I find a blog I don’t end up adding for content reasons, but that otherwise seems cool, and it has a blogroll. I’ll go ahead and pull their blogroll in to my file. (If I do add them to the reader, my plan is to someday go back and dig my list for blogrolls.)
• I have visited links styled, so I can easily skip blogs I’ve checked before.
• Some kind of vu-nostalgia (or maybe a sehnsucht) for the early days of the web, when people had to hand-punch cards with their URLs (which used dotted-decimal) and drop them into a pneumatic tube that would return full of loose pixels they would then have to dump into an etch-a-sketch and sew them together with the two knobs. At least, I heard that’s how it worked.

Its main disadvantage is that it’s not something I can really hand over to people who might want to do it for themselves. It’s a bit clumsy to pull in new entries, for example, requiring at least regular expressions. But the sites I linked a few posts back do that work, their main drawback being they aren’t able to be seeded with potential links you want to go through.

In any case, lots of cool people out there. You’re (probably) one of them (though you’re definitely cooler if you have a blog), so I hope you have a cool Valentine’s Day!